As data centers become larger and more numerous, efficient operation is desirable, particularly to reduce energy utilization and associated cost, which is a substantial portion of the operational cost of a data center. In order to assess and quantify energy utilization, a power usage effectiveness (PUE) index, and its inverse, the data center infrastructure efficiency (DCIE), are two standard efficiency metrics used by data center administrators which consider the power utilization of the information technology (IT) infrastructure as compared to the total power utilization of the data center.
In order to determine the power utilization of the IT infrastructure, including servers, switches, and storage devices, hardware devices, such as power meters, can be disposed proximate each server device, each server rack, or between the incoming power supply and the IT infrastructure, for example. However, monitoring using a plurality of meters requires additional cost to obtain, install, and maintain the meters, additional space, which is often at a premium, in the data center to locate the meters, and an additional mechanism for aggregating, displaying, and/or analyzing the output of the meters, such as in the event calculation of an efficiency metric value is desired. In an implementation in which a location exists allowing one meter, or relatively few meters, to isolate the power utilization of the IT infrastructure, or portions thereof, the resulting data will lack the granularity required to effectively analyze the IT devices and make decisions to improve the efficiency of the data center.
Software monitoring applications running in the background on each of a plurality of IT devices have also been developed to determine power utilization and communicate the information, such as to a central monitoring station. However, the agent software applications require additional cost to obtain, install, and maintain and additional processing cycles of the IT devices when operational, which is not desirable.